Vol. 19: Trump and DeSantis, made simple

Everything you need to know, in two quotations

“Ideological Battle Shapes Up Between Trump and DeSantis,” the New York Times announced in a front-page headline on Friday, two days after Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis declared his long-awaited (by DeSantis and his wife) candidacy for president.

         But what, exactly, is the ideological conflict between these two men?

         DeSantis, the Times explained, “is telling Republicans that, unlike the mercurial Mr. Trump, he can be trusted to adhere to conservative principles.”

         Many thoughtful observers, left and right— especially at the Times—  seem to agree. According to the liberal Times columnist Gail Collins, DeSantis is “a deeply unappealing extremely right-wing enemy of Disney World” who “adheres to a strong, faith-based social conservatism. He’s pro-gun, opposed to diversity and inclusion programs in public schools.”

         Not to be outdone, the conservative Times columnist Bret Stephens describes DeSantis as “an anti-abortion extremist who should never be trusted with presidential power.” Also, “a colossal, monomaniacal, humorless, lecturesome and tedious jerk, the Ted Cruz of this campaign season.”

Compared to Hitler….

         Ah, me. It seems like only yesterday that similar labels were being plastered upon Donald Trump, who was widely reviled as a conservative, a fascist, a racist, a misogynist, an autocrat, even an anti-Semite. These labels, in my humble opinion, insulted conservatives, fascists, racists, misogynists, autocrats, and anti-Semites, all of whom at least adhere to some coherent philosophy. Hitler did take the trouble to write Mein Kampf to explain his beliefs, however demented they may have been. Trump, by contrast, has hired ghostwriters to churn out some two dozen books whose sole purpose is self-aggrandizement. (Sample titles: Think Like a Billionaire; Think Like A Champion; Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and in Life; Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success.)  He’s no fascist; he’s a narcissist.

         One small example:

         In his first ghost-written book, The Art of the Deal (1987), Trump eagerly exposed himself as a germaphobe. “One of the curses of American society,” he declared then, “is the simple act of shaking hands, and the more successful and famous one becomes, the worse this terrible custom seems to get. I happen to be a clean hands freak. I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.” This germaphobia was later cited by Trump to refute reports that he had once frolicked in a Moscow hotel room where prostitutes urinated on the bed. Nevertheless, during the Covid pandemic, when public health officials were urging everyone to practice social distancing and wear masks, Trump suddenly began ostentatiously shaking hands with everyone and pointedly refusing to wear a mask. Both in 1987 and 2020, his defiantly eccentric approach to germs conveyed a single consistent message: “Look at me!”

DeSantis’s passion

         As for DeSantis: What are his ideological credentials, aside from teaching history for a year at a private school in Georgia? What philosophical books and articles has he written? (To date, his two books are both political tracts: Dreams from Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama (2011)— a dig at Barack Obama’s introspective Dreams From My Father— and a campaign autobiography, The Courage to Be Free, published this year.) What conservative societies has he joined or addressed? At bedtime, does he curl up with the works of Edmund Burke, John Locke, Chateaubriand, Milton Friedman, or Joseph Schumpeter? What is his intellectual passion, aside from running for office?

         Over the next 18 months, you and I will be bombarded by commentaries deep and shallow about these two candidates, produced by pundits whose livelihoods require them to generate content at regular intervals. You will also be bombarded by the candidates’ ghostwriters (Thursday and Friday alone, I received ten email messages ostensibly from DeSantis, all soliciting donations). I, conversely, labor under no such obligation. So, in the interest of saving time, let me suggest two quotations that (again in my humble opinion) tell you everything you need to know about these two would-be presidents:                       

         About Donald Trump:

         From Tony Schwartz, who spent 18 months with Trump in the 1980s while ghostwriting The Art of the Deal and, during Trump’s presidency, spent much of a year with psychiatrists trying to understand Trump:

          “He is a person who is far outside the norms of ordinary behavior… This is a man who has simultaneously been unleashed because he has pushed away all his critics, at least internally, but at the same time feels under siege. The collective or total amount of pressure he feels, I think, in a very predictable way has taken a guy and made him in ways more grandiose and more out of touch with reality. He lives now within his own version of reality almost 100 percent of the time. And that reality has almost nothing to do with reality in the way that most of us know it.” (Interviewed on CNN, July 2018.)

         About Ron DeSantis:

         From Stuart Stevens, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 Republican presidential campaign:

         “To me, Ron DeSantis is a fairly run-of-the-mill politician who will do anything to get elected.” (Quoted in The New Yorker, June 20, 2022.)

         As Keats put it in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, “That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

         I can guess what you’re thinking: Keats was talking about beauty and truth; I’m talking about Trump and DeSantis. Wait— there’s a difference?